life simply in just a few obsessions…

Happy Sunday everyone! And hello August! Seriously. August. I turn 25 this month, it’s basically time to start working out a new name for this blog. Because a) I’m over dramatic and feeling like my twenties is nearly over and b) I hate naming things. Anyway, enough of that nonsense. It’s been a while since I shared a life lately post, but I was inspired by Katy’s Obsessions post to share with you just some of the things that have been making life lately run a bit smoother…

My new phone…

So I don’t have the best luck with phones (or rather they don’t have the best luck with me). I’ve had one stolen, one disappear in a friends house, and more than one loss at tea (I actually drop them into tea – cos you know, Instagram). With this in mind, when the screen on my last phone cracked but was still perfectly workable (to me) I held out as long as I could before exploring newer shinier options. A cracked screen meant nobody was going to steal it, and any further accidents would only cause minor disruption, besides who wants to pay contract get out fees etc. etc. HOWEVER, I then realised, summer was going to be pretty darn exciting and the camera on my old phone just wasn’t cutting it anymore, this paired with EE actually having a special upgrade early for free offer, finally pushed me to bite the bullet and I’m so glad I did. My Samsung S5 is only a month old, and my already have a wee scuff, but I love it none the less. It has also inspired a new obsession with apps, and photographing everything and anything, and generally ignoring the people around me. I need to be careful though, or I’ll actually miss summer.

Headspace

One of my missions for this year was to read into mindfulness a little bit more and then actually practice it. I’m a natural stress head, and to some extent I run on this, however, there are only so many sleepless nights one girl can take, and it’s becoming increasingly apparent I need to learn how to switch my mind off. I downloaded the headspace app a couple of months back and never got into it, but the other night, it was 3 am and I was wide awake worrying about a problem I could do absolutely nothing about, so I decided it was probably time to give meditation another go. Headspace is a free app, that guides you through a ten day course of meditation, prompting you to take ten minutes each day. At the end you can either stick with just those 10 guided meditations or take out a monthly subscription and get access to hundreds of guided meditations. If the problem I hasn’t been worrying about so much lately wasn’t money related, I’d be taking out that subscription, but even though it is less than netflix, for now I’m happy to just keep going over the ten day course. Meditating isn’t really meant to send you to sleep, it’s actually meant to give you the opportunity to reboot, but practicing how to control my busy mind, is definitely helping me get a better nights rest!

Getting down to business…

I’ve decided I want to start taking my freelance theatre work a bit more seriously. I’ve got to a place in my day job where I think I now could not only juggle taking on another project but also kind of need it to feel creatively fulfilled. In making this decision I’ve also been trying to work out, how all the different things I do fit together. This will be a long project which I think starts with redoing my theatre website, but will hopefully end in me taking on lots more different creative roles. You won’t see much of a change here, except maybe one or two more theatre based posts popping up. In doing all this I’ve been listening to some great podcasts by creative entrepreneurs lately which have really helped me make sense of it all, in particular Love Being Boss and Invisible Office Hours, which I’d recommend to anyone who wants to make more of their creativty or side project.

Evernote…

I first heard of Evernote when Holly mentioned it on her blog, and while I gave it a quick glance, I decided it wasn’t really for me. At least not in terms of organising my blog. However, with a new season at work starting, and having made the decision to start taking my freelance theatre work more seriously again, I’ve found Evernote is a great way of keeping all my thoughts organised in one place. I will always prefer a paper notebook for jotting down ideas in but having an online place which I can access from anywhere and link all related documents too has been a godsend. For those of you that don’t know, Evernote is an online workspace where you can create multiple notebooks for different projects. You can make to do lists, clip and save whole webpages to it, and what I’ve found really handy is being able to upload all the documents related to one project on to one page. Oh, and it comes as an app for your phone, so I can quickly find out all the information I need all the time (see this is why I need to meditate!)

Grimm…

Besides meditation the other thing I’ve been using to switch off, is Grimm, on Netflix. I don’t know if you’ve watched this yet, but the first couple of seasons it’s pretty much a formulaic cop drama where each episode follows pretty much the same structure, expcept for the fact that pretty much all the bad guys, are creatures from Grimm fairytales. This makes it perfect background tv that you don’t really need to concentrate on, until the longer sub plot kicks in in season 3, and then you can wave good bye to trying to concentrate on anything else at all. Sigh. It’s a good job I’ve nearly finished it, otherwise that serious freelance work would never get done!

So there you have it, those are the things that have been featuring in my life pretty much every day lately and perfectly sums up this weekend. Yesterday I did some freelance work in a library, then came home, spent no money, worked on my new website and spent the evening watching Grimm. Today is blog, run, tidy and again spend no money as the rest of August is one big spendathon! What have you been obsessing over recently? And how is the rest of your weekend looking?

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Hello and welcome to Tea in your Twenties! Thanks for stopping by my little spot on the internet where I chat all things, life, love, tea and theatre. I hope you pop the kettle on and stay a while,
Stephie x

If you would like to get in touch about anything at all, please email me at stephanieclaire@teacuptheatre.com I'd love to hear from you!

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